{"doi":"10.31083/j.jin2205133","title":"Evaluating Dual Task Neurological Costs with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy: A Preliminary Report in Healthy Athletes","abstract":"Background: Dual task assessments, which simultaneously challenge and assess cognitive and motor performance, have been used to improve the assessment of athletes with sports-related concussions (SRC). Our lab created a Dual Task Screen (DTS) to evaluate athletes with SRCs, and we have established that it is a valid behavioral measure, as it consistently elicits poorer behavioral performance under dual, compared to single, task conditions. Here, we used a Neuroimaging-Compatible (NC) version of the DTS, named the NC-DTS, which uses portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess behavioral performance and neural recruitment during single and dual tasks. Our study objective was to evaluate healthy athletes and establish whether the NC-DTS is a valid dual task neurological assessment that can elicit different patterns of neural recruitment during dual versus single task conditions. Methods: Twenty-five healthy collegiate athletes completed the NC-DTS in a single laboratory visit. The NC-DTS includes a lower and upper extremity subtask; both include single motor, single cognitive, and dual task conditions. The NC-DTS was administered in a block design, where conditions (i.e., single motor, single cognitive, and dual task) were repeated five times to generate average behavioral performance and task-dependent neural recruitment in superficial cortical regions including: prefrontal cortex, bilateral primary motor and sensory cortices, and posterior parietal cortex. Neural recruitment was measured with fNIRS and quantified using oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) metrics. A single-tailed, within subject t-test was used to compare average dual task behavioral performance to average single task behavioral performance. Pairwise comparisons, that were family-wise-error (FWE) corrected, were used to compare localized neural recruitment during dual versus single task conditions. Results: As observed in previous studies, the NC-DTS elicited significantly poorer behavioral performance under dual, compared to single, task conditions. Additionally, dual task conditions of the NC-DTS elicited significantly greater neural recruitment in regions of the brain associated with attention allocation and task-specific demands in three of four comparisons. Conclusions: These preliminary results suggest that the NC-DTS is a valid dual task neurological assessment which warrants future work using the NC-DTS to evaluate athletes with SRCs.","journal":"Journal of Integrative Neuroscience","year":2023,"id":356369,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9609,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1105082,"name":"Susan M. Mingils","orcid":"0000-0001-7839-5645","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1105083,"name":"Silvia Orlandi","orcid":"0000-0003-2733-8450","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":415927,"name":"Jaclyn A. Stephens","orcid":"0000-0003-2662-0104","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":61,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:13:25.429924Z","pmid":"37735135","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}